Efficient responses to climate change require accurate estimates of both aggregate damages and where and to whom they occur. While specific case studies and simulations have suggested that climate change disproportionately affects the poor, large-scale direct evidence of the magnitude and origins of this disparity is lacking. Similarly, evidence on aggregate damages, which is a […]

Using a dataset of 15 million UK job adverts from a recruitment website, we construct new economic statistics measuring labour market demand. These data are ‘naturally occurring’, having originally been posted online by firms. They offer information on two dimensions of vacancies—region and occupation—that firm-based surveys do not usually, and cannot easily, collect. These data […]

Barber and Odean study the relationship between trading activity and returns. They find that households who trade more have a lower net return than other households. They argue that these results cannot emerge from a model with rational traders and instead attribute these findings to overconfidence. In contrast, we find that household financial choices generated […]

Chinese local governments wield their enormous political power and administrative capacity to provide “special deals” for favored private firms. We argue that China’s extraordinary economic growth comes from these special deals. Local political leaders do so because they derive personal benefits, either political or monetary, from providing special deals. Competition between local governments limits the […]

We introduce a computationally tractable dynamic equilibrium model of the automobile market where new and used cars of multiple types (e.g. makes/models) are traded by heterogeneous consumers. Prices and quantities are determined endogenously to equate supply and demand for all car types and vintages, along with the ages at which cars are scrapped. The model […]

Eight Data Sources for Research on U.S. Housing Market.

The National Association of Realtors communicated today that its index of Pending Homes Sales increased 3.5 percent in February 2016. This indicator offers valuable insight for housing market analysis here in the United States. Indeed, the index makes up a leading indicator of housing market and forecasts since it is based on signed real estate contracts, including single family homes, condos and co-ops. The relevance of tracking this index’s evolution, and other metrics listed herein, stems from the fact that the Great Recession originated presumably from failures within the regulation of the housing market.

By Catherine De Las Salas

Although the Pending Homes Sales moved upwards on February, this news is contradicting the long term trend of Home Ownership rate, which has been steadily declining since the beginning of the Great Recession. This fact could be pointing to a fascinating development in the sector. Precisely, these type of contradictions is the reason the U.S. housing market has become so intriguing for researchers, especially since toxic Mortgage Backed Securities triggered the Great Recession in the United States.

There are several resources at hand for advancing research in U.S. Housing Market. The ones that econometricus.com monitors frequently are the following:

Moreover, some of the most trusted housing sector metrics were proposed after the Great Recession (2009). For those who consider that the Great Recession was not an exclusive event of banking leverage, complexity and liquidity (learn more on this issue here), the following measures may shed light on valuable research questions and answers. In other words, flaws in the supply side of the housing market –Mortgage lending banks- might have had an impact in spreading the Great Recession, but, more importantly, the demand side could have had a more relevant role in triggering the crisis. Thus, these data may help researchers in explaining when and why mortgages went underwater in the first place.

Finally, Econometricus.com helps clients in understanding the economic relationship between a specific research and the United States’ Housing Market environment. Applied-Analysis can be either “Snapshots” of the Housing Market in U.S. Economy or historical trends (Time-series Analysis). Clients may simplify or augment the scope of their research by including these important variables in their models.